This is Michael editing to see whether we have a bug. [[User:RitcheyMT|RitcheyMT]] 17:15, 27 January 2010 (UTC)

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Michael Ritchey,&nbsp;the founding manager of FamilySearch Wiki,&nbsp;is a community and content manager&nbsp;of the Community Services team, a workgroup in the Family History Department, Corporation of the President, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.&nbsp;The Community Services&nbsp;workgroup was assembled in December 2008. Roughly half the team came from the Research Support workgroup who are the founders of FamilySearch Wiki.&nbsp;

Michael Ritchey,&nbsp;the founding manager of FamilySearch Wiki,&nbsp;is a community and content manager&nbsp;of the Community Services team, a workgroup in the Family History Department, Corporation of the President, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.&nbsp;The Community Services&nbsp;workgroup was assembled in December 2008. Roughly half the team came from the Research Support workgroup who are the founders of FamilySearch Wiki.&nbsp;

Revision as of 17:15, 27 January 2010

This is Michael editing to see whether we have a bug. RitcheyMT 17:15, 27 January 2010 (UTC)

Michael Ritchey, the founding manager of FamilySearch Wiki, is a community and content manager of the Community Services team, a workgroup in the Family History Department, Corporation of the President, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The Community Services workgroup was assembled in December 2008. Roughly half the team came from the Research Support workgroup who are the founders of FamilySearch Wiki.

A new sandbox

My favorite report

Pages I recommend to new users

Etiquette Guidelines. When people who are accustomed to creating their own Websites or paper publications first engage as a wiki contributor, they commonly struggle with the transition from a heirarchal command-and-control publication management model to a flat, peer-based, consensus-driven community editing model. A document that we've found useful to get our heads in the right mindset is Etiquette Guidelines. It'll teaches users how to work smoothly and efficiently with others in the wiki environment.

Good articles

Prussia-Brandenburg Civil Registration details jurisdiction changes that affect which office would have documented vital records of ancestors there. Shows old place names with their modern equivalents, and links to indexes listing streets and their corresponding civil registration offices.

Users from whom I solicit opinions

These are the users who I invite to weigh in on wiki discussions -- particularly governance or Manual of Style issues.

Usability concerns

The following are usability issues I think we should address in usability meeting:

Usability concerns in FamilySearch Wiki

#

Description

Date reported in JIRA

JIRA #

Date fixed

1

A tempoorary break in scrolling tables means we need to code scrolling tables like the one on FamilySearch Wiki:WikiProject U.S. Census. Scrolling tables are broken since we upgraded to MediaWiki 1.15.1 because it does not support custom CSS. David Crowther fixed the skin (FamilySearchWiki.php) in a test iteration, but that iteration won't roll to Production till we roll CIS integration.

Search returns false results -- deleted page content. Reported by Diltsgd. If you use the Search box to hunt for the Butterfield Overland Mail one of the items it will return is Sandbox 17. On 18 June the Sandbox held content related to the Butterfield Overland Mail but now has all content about trails removed. So we are getting a false hit on a page that no longer holds that content, and missing a hit on the page that is most directly about that title.

x

3

Diltsgd reports: From time to time I have noticed that an ampersand (&) symbol appearing in an Internet URL is multiplied many fold in the Wiki. I notice it particularly on footnotes and other places where I will often include a URL address. If the phrase starts out in Rich Text Editor as "Railroad&old" and in Wiki Text "Railroad&old", after awhile (several saves?) it seems to turn into "Railroad&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;old"

couldn't reproduce

4

Diltsgd reports: Is there anything that can be done to make intermittent behaving Wiki footnotes more stable? The problem is that ALL the note numbers in the text appear as the number [1] and none of the actual words of the notes appear in the footnote area. About 1/3 of the time this problem happens, especially on articles with more than two footnotes. The articles with the most footnotes seem to have the poorest record. I would estimate that out of the last five times I’ve opened the New Sweden page with 90+ footnotes it has actually displayed the footnotes only once. But the problem crops up intermittently on almost every page with footnotes.

x

5

Users are giving me feedback that the red words in search results are confusing them because in a wiki a red link means a page that has not yet been edited. Red=stub. And stub=lame article I wouldn’t select if it showed up in search results. They ask for search terms in search results to appear in a color other than red.

x

6

How-to pages are "all over the place" according to one user, and need to be consolidated under one page. And other users say we need more cross-referencing between them.

x

7

Changing the style of headings. Heading 1 currently has bigger text than a page's title. We need to fix the styles site-wide so people can use Heading 1. (Added as a MOS item 16 June 2009.)

8

Bug: Look at the list above. On number 10 and 11, the leading 1 doesn't render right in IE7.

?

9

Bug: internal links are getting ruined to look like this: <a href="FamilySearch Wiki:WikiProject Linking to Books in the BYU Family History Archives">linking wiki articles to local histories on BYU Digital Archives</a>

could not reproduce

10

Insert white space between end of an article and the social bookmarking tool.

x

11

When someone clicks Discussion on a page, they then see a title "Talk:[article title]. This is confusing. The name of the link (Discussion) should match the name of the namespace (Talk).

x

12

If a page is over 35k and you try to edit it, a popup was appearing that said something to the effect that a timeout had occurred running the script on the page. The error gave the user a choice of whether he wanted to continue running scripts on the page, but that if he chose to do so, the system or browser might freeze. Contributors reported that they were afraid to continue, so they'd click "No." There's also a line in WikiMedia.org that says in IE6, if you try to edit a page over 35k, the page would be "deleted." In Sept 2009, Jim, Kip and Mike replicated the process in IE7, IE8 and FF3.5 to find that the error msg above does not appear. Instead was a message at the top of the Edit screen saying "WARNING: This page is 100 kilobytes long; some browsers may have problems editing pages approaching or longer than 32kb. Please consider breaking the page into smaller sections." We decided that this seems to be an IE6 problem. Since Google Analytics shows only 15% of our traffic is from IE6, we choose not to spend resources on this issue.

13

I would agree with Talk vs. Discussion (#11 above). However, I believe that "discussion" would be more clear to most people especially those that are beginners. In other words, I would rather see Discussion than Talk being used. I also believe that the "Page" namespace can be a little intimidating and that "Article" (as Wikipedia uses) is a more friendly name. Thomas Lerman 15:07, 14 July 2009 (UTC)

Projects

New items to prioritize in the backlog

32k limit on page size: What browsers and browser versions choke on editing a >32k page?

Projects within the development sprint, 20 Mar 2009 - 14 Apr 2009

Project

Results

Launch projects to overhaul 2 U.S. record types at country and state level.

Projects are launched, but team leads are scheduled a laughable amount of wiki time to manage them. Michael has worked many hours on trying to win more wiki time for the team leads. If priorities don't change at the FHL or we don't decide to use the community to do these writing projects, deliverables for US/Canada content will remain in jeopardy.

Enable community to work on projects. The community needs a way to see and then volunteer to engage in multiple projects.

Enabled Dorothy Horan's team to work on describing Record Search collections.

Enabled the Authorities team to progress on its integration project by creating <a href="FamilySearch Wiki:WikiProject Integrating Place Standards Database with FamilySearch Wiki">WikiProject Integrating Place Standards Database with FamilySearch Wiki</a>, which tracks issues, solutions, and progress.

<a href="FamilySearch Wiki:Naming Conventions for Project Pages">Created FamilySearch Wiki:Naming Conventions for Project Pages</a> to steer the community into adopting standards that will enhance searchability of project pages by defining which namespace they will be stored in and by clarifying which keywords will be used in naming them.

Enabled US/Canada team leads to work on <a href="FamilySearch Wiki:WikiProject U.S. Vital Records">WikiProject U.S. Vital Records</a> and <a href="FamilySearch Wiki:WikiProject U.S. Country and State Pages about the Census">WikiProject U.S. Country and State Pages about the Census</a>.

Created <a href="FamilySearch Wiki:Sources of Information for a United States Record Type Article">FamilySearch Wiki:Sources of Information for a United States Record Type Article</a> to improve article quality and completeness, track progress, and define specific sub-tasks which allow writers to work on various aspects of revising a common article without tripping over each other.

Enabled APG members to work on <a href="FamilySearch Wiki:WikiProject Professional Genealogists">WikiProject Professional Genealogists</a>.

Obtained data for missionaries to work on <a href="FamilySearch Wiki:WikiProject Linking to Books in the BYU Family History Archives">FamilySearch Wiki:WikiProject Linking to Books in the BYU Family History Archives</a>.

Enable community to vet best practices regarding where to place cemetery information (county vs. town pages).

This task is dependent on adding 1st round of policies and procedures. It was a mistake to think that story could be completed and this one completed afterwards all in one sprint. Experience has taught us that a smarter method is to research something in one sprint, make recommendations for review in the second sprint, review the recommendations in the third sprint, and deploy it in the fourth sprint. This particular item called for a deployment of a solution that had not yet been researched, recommended, or reviewed. Dumb idea.

Add 1st round of policies and procedures. Add to the wiki the 1st round of policies and prodedures that will allow the community to gevern themselves.

Created <a href="FamilySearch Wiki:How Community Governs Wikipedia">FamilySearch Wiki:How Community Governs Wikipedia</a> and added to it incrementally.

Helped solve 2-column rendering problem associated with Fran's great pages on policies such as <a href="User:JensenFA/Policies and Procedures">User:JensenFA/Policies and Procedures</a>.

Like the cemetery information task above, this task called for deployment of a solution that had not yet been researched, recommended, or reviewed.

Update all census pages for the U.S. at the country and state level. Add information to these articles from sources on <a href="FamilySearch Wiki:Sources of Information for a United States Record Type Article">FamilySearch Wiki:Sources of Information for a United States Record Type Article</a>.

Update all vital records pages for the U.S. at the country and state level. Add information to these articles from sources on <a href="FamilySearch Wiki:Sources of Information for a United States Record Type Article">FamilySearch Wiki:Sources of Information for a United States Record Type Article</a>.

Add county creation dates and parent counties tables to all U.S. states. See an example: <a href="Wisconsin County Creation Dates and Parent Counties">Wisconsin County Creation Dates and Parent Counties</a>.

Recruit a <a href="FamilySearch Wiki:WikiProject Maryland News and Events">Maryland news and events "reporter"</a> (also have him/her do Did You Know section) (Depends on creation of <a href="Finding Genealogy News and Events within the United States">Finding Genealogy News and Events within the United States</a>)

2.0

x

Replacement for portal template

<img src="/en/images/thumb/9/94/Dbase_error.jpg/180px-Dbase_error.jpg" _fck_mw_filename="Dbase error.jpg" _fck_mw_type="thumb" alt="Here's an error" class="fck_mw_frame fck_mw_right" />The place portal pages (those titled "Portal:[place name]" use a MediaWiki template to create and lay out the boxes on the page. This template is problemmatical for two reasons. First, the content of each box on a portal page is actually a sub-page, so none of the content in the sub-pages is considered by search engines to be on the portal page itself. So although a portal's sub-pages may contain a lot of great content, search engines don't attribute any of that content to the portal page itself. That means words within in the sub-pages cannot be used in a search engine to find the portal page. As far as search engines are concerned, then, the Denmark portal page is just an empty shell with some code, not a content-rich page on everything you need to know about Danish research. This problem is common to external search engines like Google as well as the wiki's own search engine. To solve the problem, we need to find a more search-engine-friendly way to lay out boxes in our place pages. Mollie, Fran and Michael have all tried different solutions; have a look and see which ones you like.

Mollie's <a href="England/Test1">England/Test1</a> page

Fran's

Michael's <a href="Pennsylvania">Pennsylvania</a> page

Some projects from 2007

Item

Assignee

Date done

Entrance requirement for Closed Beta (Beta 2)

Exit requirement for Beta 2

Requirement for Open Beta?

Implement page reviewing in Plone

Michael/Mollie

13 Nov 07

X

Write page on purpose of site

Michael/Mollie

16 Nov 07

X

Write page on appropriate types of content

Michael

18 Nov 07

X

User acceptance on "done" items.

Rsrch Suppt

21 Nov 07

X

Create user list for closed beta

Bruce/Amos

28 Nov 07

X

Delete empty "test" articles as per report from Bruce

Elder Johnson

30 Nov 07

X

Definitions of disallowed content types

Michael

03 Dec 07

X

Review/Delete 148 test/junk pages

Elder Johnson

04 Dec 07

X

Manually fix 870 broken links

Mollie

05 Dec 07

X

Discover predicters of admin role growth

Mollie

05 Dec 07

X

Determine requirements for categories

Rsrch Suppt

05 Dec 07

X

Create standards for naming place pages

Michael

05 Dec 07

X

Remove the word "Wiki" from portal pages

Mollie

07 Dec 07

X

Specify language of 862 articles with no lang. attributed

Mollie

10 Dec 07

X

Fix duplicate titles

Sister Ackerson

11 Dec 07

X

Remove pull-quote navigation boxes sitewide

Bruce

11 Dec 07

X

Fix thousands of misformatted FHLC call numbers

Bruce

12 Dec 07

X

Write page on how to categorize

Darris

12 Dec 07

X

Increase font sizes for readability

David

13 Dec 07

X

Move Edit links from in front of headings (Left justify "edit" links)

David

13 Dec 07

X

Identify all how-tos

Anne, Darris, Michael, Mollie

13 Dec 07

X

Delete all Research Topics pages

Mollie

13 Dec 07

X

Fix search result numbers so they are not off to the side of the main article box

David

13 Dec 07

X

Find out how widespread the table migration problem is.

Mollie

14 Dec 07

X

Troubleshoot any loss of formatting from Plone --> MediaWiki that will require hundreds of hours of manual cleanup.

Darris, Michael

14 Dec 07, ongoing

X

Prioritize writing order of how-to pages

Michael

17 Dec 07, ongoing

X

Write how-to pages

Kay

17 Dec 07, ongoing

X

Define requirements on browse taxonomy for places

Michael

19 Dec 07

X

Fix pages with colons.

Fran

19 Dec 07

X

Fix Main Page's country list

Michael

19 Dec 07

X

Delete Main Page's topics list

19 Dec 07

X

Minimize # of links in Nav bar

Michael

20 Dec 07

X

Add Contact Us link to Nav bar

Michael

20 Dec 07

X

Create Contact Us link on Home page

Michael

20 Dec 07

X

Fix U.S. states table

Mollie

20 Dec 07

X

Write page about renaming pages

Kay

X

Write page about how to disambiguate page titles

Kay

X

Write page about how to add a new language site

Michael

X

Find a searchable home for Private content

Michael

X

Check Special Page --> Articles with Most Revisions to identify any necessary cleanup

X

Skin: Reinstate the create this page link to Search Results screen.

X

Add category for Articles for Deletion

X

Move login link so it is visible without scrolling

X

Need additional search options

X

Write lesson on creating browse taxonomy and categories for places.

X

Define and write lesson on creating browse taxonomy and categories for non-place topics.

X

Write requirements for improving Search

X

Add linked list of record types to each place page

X

Research copyright/copyleft licenses

Ransom

X

Requirements for linking using WYSIWYG tool

Darris

X

Requirements to simplify adding a page

Darris

X

Create Sandbox where new users can test edit tools

Bruce

X

Research and list all templates the site needs (disambiguation, stub article, etc.).

X

Research all actions admins should do.

X

Research all bots the site needs.

X

Find extension to allow pasting of tables from other apps.

X

Add a way to recognize top contributors

X

Plan to solicit needed articles

X

Plan on oversight of domains and portals

Mollie

X

Moderation Plan: Reviewing new articles in MediaWiki

Michael/Mollie

X

Moderation Plan: Image review and copyright

Michael/Mollie

X

5 pillars

Michael

X

Namespaces

X

Rating content

X

Moderation Plan: Ranking users

X

Moderation Plan: Research the work volume per role

X

Moderation Plan: Staffing plan per role

X

Moderation Plan: How to populate sections on home pg. & portals (Did You Know, Featured Article, Articles Needed, Popular Discussions, and Featured Training Modules)